Book Review: Party Funding and Corruption

organizational needs’ (p. 19). One of the counterintuitive findings of Kirdiş’s research is that, in all three countries, while ideologically stricter groups (or ‘vanguard groups’, as Kirdiş terms them) are more likely to become involved in electoral politics since they view the control of state power as crucial, more flexible and heterogeneous grassroots movements (aiming for bottom-up societal transformation), which are ‘more likely to engage in internal debate and self-reflection’, tend to stay away from party politics and participation (p. 169). Despite Kirdiş’s rigorous qualitative comparative analysis, there are a couple of lacuna that could have been addressed in the book. One of these is the position of Jordan’s Quietist Salafism, which Kirdiş considers a ‘social movement’ in the mould of the Gülen Community in Turkey or the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan. In fact, Kirdiş describes Quietist Salafism as a dispersed practice of scattered groups and individuals without any meaningful degree of internal coordination and communication (p. 97–101). Kirdiş’s preference for defining Quietist Salafism as a social movement could have been justified by a more nuanced discussion on the concept of “social movements”. In addition, the decisions made by these groups (e.g., a vanguard group opting to participate in electoral politics and grassroots movements preferring to stay away from party politics) could also be seen as outcomes of the inter-action between vanguard groups and rival grassroots movements. In fact, when one of these groups decides to participate, this might make any Islamic groups left behind in the social realm hesitant to participate in an electoral market that already contains an Islamic actor. Nevertheless, it is evident that both Livny and Kirdiş made meticulous and diligent efforts to analyse their research topics, and their theoretical and methodological approaches provide compelling support for their hypotheses. But fully understanding Islamic socio-political actors and the causal mechanisms underlying their participation, success, and failure in the electoral arena also requires research that combines comparative methods with ethnographic and historical perspectives.